What changed, and when

12 August 2026

Seventeen event types, groups, and GEDCOM

The largest change since launch. Everything below is additive: trees built before this release open unchanged, and nothing is rewritten until you make an edit yourself. The readable version of this release is on the blog: The tool caught up with the model.

• Five new event types, taking the model from twelve to seventeen. Severance ends a parent–child relationship without erasing that it existed — the missing opposite of adoption. Duplication makes an independent copy of a person; absorption ends the absorbed and keeps the absorber. Membership puts people into groups. Attribute is described below.
• Names and families can change over time. Until now a person had one name for their whole life. A name or a house is now something that can change on a date, and the tree shows whichever was true at the year you are looking at. Search finds every name a person ever had, so you can look someone up by the name you remember rather than the one they were filed under.
• Groups. Mark a cohort that shares an origin which isn't descent — arrivals, a founding wave, an order. Members get a ring in the group's colour, and selecting a group draws the threads between them without adding anything permanent to your tree.
• GEDCOM import and export. GEDCOM is the format real genealogy programs use, so a tree can now come in from one and go back out to one. Import shows you what it will do before anything is saved. Export gives you the file, a report of what was preserved, approximated, or dropped, and a plain-text companion listing anything GEDCOM has no way to express. Nothing is guessed and nothing is invented — where a faithful conversion isn't possible, it says so.
• Defusion is now called splitting, and does more: it can end a person and start or restore several, which is what it was always doing. Older files that use the old name still load.
• The Markdown export was rewritten. It used to emit a wiki-shaped document with invented page identifiers. It is now a plain readable report of who exists and what happened to them, which is what most people wanted it for.
• Tablets work. The canvas only ever listened for a mouse, so on an iPad without one you could not pan or zoom at all. Reported by a user on 11 August; one finger pans, two fingers zoom.
• Example trees can be linked directly. A link like /app/?example=egyptian-gods opens that tree instead of the file picker, and never overwrites your own copy of it.

18 June 2026

Public launch

Ahnenwerk went live at ahnenwerk.app: the tool, a guide, an AI-assistant page, and three example trees — the British Crown, the Egyptian gods, and Julio-Claudian Rome. Free, no account, everything stored in your own browser.